Excess in the Anzac centenary overlooks other military endeavours

James Brown

Australia is about to spend $325 million commemorating Anzac. It's an extraordinary amount of money for a country that already has a war memorial in nearly every suburb. It stands starkly in contrast to the cost-cutting across every other area of policy in cash-strapped state and federal governments.

Though we are absolutely right to mark the significance of the centenary of the First World War, Australia will outspend the United Kingdom's centenary program by 200 per cent. Anzac remembrance on this side of the Tasman will cost nearly 20 times what our New Zealand colleagues have allocated. Rather than letting silent contemplation be our offering to those who served and died for us, we are embarking on a discordant and exorbitant four-year festival, that looks like an Anzacs arms race of sorts.

Across the country, and in the Dardanelles, Australians are looking for bigger and better ways to salute our military forebears. And many companies are looking to cash in.

In 2015 cruise ships will ply Anzac Cove as Bert Newton narrates the war. One company has applied for permission to market an Anzac ice-cream, another here in Melbourne has been awarded $27million in contracts for Anzac events management. Government is crafting an Anzac merchandising plan to match. A century after Gallipoli, the Anzac spirit is being bottled, stamped, and sold.

But beyond the excesses, and crass commercialisation, the real danger of our approach to this centenary is that all our efforts might be occluding the stories of our modern veterans and undercutting the work of the current Australian Defence Force. Every story we tell about Simpson and his donkey in the next four years is a story we are not telling about the work of our modern military in places like Afghanistan.

Over the past years I've been staggered by the fact that despite attending dawn services in increasing numbers, Australians I speak to seem to understand less and less about the nature of modern war and the work of our serving soldiers. We have a limited bandwidth to look at military issues, after all we live in a country thankfully far away from most of the world's traditional conflict zones and relatively unscathed by direct experience of war.

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It's stretching a little - but only a little - to conclude that most Australians would only have ever seen their soldiers performing ceremonial duties. That is true for surprising numbers of our elected representatives as well. Engaging with the military on only one day of the year may be engendering a superficial public understanding of the Defence Force and modern war.

Compared to our closest allies, public conversations on the military in Australia seem excessively simplistic and bifurcated.

On one hand shrill voices deny the legitimacy of a professional military and the possibility of armed conflict. On the other the jingoistic mindlessly trumpet the majesty of the Defence Force without pausing to critically assess its performance. The middle ground, in which we accept military force is sometimes necessary but should not be used capriciously, has fallen away. A nuanced public discussion that should help lift the performance of our military isn't happening. Putting the soldiers of 100 years ago on too high a pedestal can be problematic too.

Because of our constant stories of Anzac, many Australians believe in the exceptionalism of the Australian soldier. A belief that all Australia needs do in time of war is hand a rifle to every athletic man, and a grenade to every cricket player, engenders complacency about current defence policy.

Inexplicably, while we are planning to construct more war memorials, our Defence Force remains under-funded. Both sides of politics acknowledge that we are spending 0.4 per cent of GDP less on the military than is necessary to keep its equipment modernised and ready, and its people well trained and protected.

In Port Phillip finishing touches are being applied to Australia's two new helicopter carriers. One hundred years after the landings at Anzac Cove our Defence Force is once again looking to learn the science of amphibious operations and landing troops on distant shores. Though Australians have focused much on the sacrifice at Anzac, we have forgotten many of the lessons of the military operation at Gallipoli.

Today, the military experts on the amphibious battles of the Dardanelles are to be found in Quantico not Canberra. In the 1930s George Patton jnr, then a lieutenant-colonel, was dispatched to Anzac Cove to study the Australian defeat. His conclusions and a multi-year study helped the US Marine Corps develop the amphibious doctrine that underpinned their success in the Pacific during the Second World War. Even today, new Marine Corps officers study the battles of Gallipoli in detail. Yet in the Australian Defence Force, our junior officers engage with Gallipoli mostly through the emotion of Anzac Day.

If we are serious in our concern about the needless loss of lives in battle, then we have a responsibility to understand more about where our soldiers might be deployed tomorrow and how they might be led. Rather than building new multimillion dollar Anzac interpretative centres in far-flung Albany, we need a centre to interpret the lessons of our more modern wars and help shape our thinking about defending against future strife.

Respect for our military dead is important. There is much that is good about Anzac. But we must make sure that we balance looking back to the past with looking ahead to the future.

We cannot bring back our slain soldiers, no matter how grand our commemorations. But we can work to save the lives of soldiers now, and in the future.

James Brown served in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Solomon Islands. He is the author of Anzac's Long Shadow: the cost of our national obsession.